Google Sawzall now open source

http://code.google.com/p/szl/

by mokeefe • 16 years ago

94 25 16 years ago

code.google.com

vomjom• 16 years ago

The paper: http://research.google.com/archive/sawzall.html

On a related topic about another Google project: http://sergey.melnix.com/pub/melnik_VLDB10.pdf

DrJosiah6• 16 years ago

I took a Sawzall class for a week at Google along with my team, our manager had requested it because there was a lot of things that we wanted to do with logs in the long-term, which were quickest to do with Sawzall. The people who taught the class were awesome, but I can't help feeling that they were a bit apologetic for 1) knowing so much about the language, 2) having to teach us, and 3) not being able to change the language in any way. But maybe that's hindsight and altered memories based on the dinner and drinks we shared after the week of classes.

The opacity of the language lead to a shared conclusion of those in the class (some of whom were taking it as a refresher), that all of the unique Sawzall code at Google had already been written in the first few months of it's use, and everyone else had just been copying and pasting snippets from everyone else's scripts.

I can understand why Google released it, it's the start to a halfway decent map-reduce implementation, having a low-overhead startup, quick runtime, etc. (compared to Python, which had been an initial logs processor, but which was punted for logs-processing mapreduces thanks to it's relatively high startup costs compared to processing time). But with things like Hadoop (and it's support for arbitrary languages for operations), I can't help but feel like this is a little late to the open source game.

Also, back at Google, I had the start to a project to translate a subset of Python to Sawzall in order to allow for people to not have to suffer, and potentially to write better logs processing code. Left before even getting close to finishing it.

andrix• 16 years ago

I'm wondering if this is the start of a set of open source lunching from google of its core tools. AFAIK, sawzall without mapreduce is like a car without the engine, but anyway I'm very pleased to read the code and start trying the language. Kudos to Google!

eof• 16 years ago

Do you mean an engine without a car? It seems like you mean sawzall is only useful for mapreduce.

michaelfairley• 16 years ago

Google's implementation of MapReduce is so tightly bound to their internal infrastructure (GFS, BigTable, etc.) that opensourcing wouldn't do anybody much good.

msbmsb• 16 years ago

Buzz post from a Googler on the release: "We have inflicted Sawzall on the world."

http://www.google.com/buzz/100587561646339426146/2Ehn2s7Nf1D...

tav2• 16 years ago

It's worth noting that you can trace parts of Google Go's lineage to Sawzall.

supersillyus• 16 years ago

Interesting. Can you elaborate?

cdavid• 16 years ago

R. Pike was involved in both projects, if that's what is meant by lineage. I am basing this on the author list in the sawzall paper, I am not working at google.

tav2• 16 years ago

Sawzall Language spec: http://szl.googlecode.com/svn/doc/sawzall-spec.html

You might also want to take a look at Cascalog. It offers a much nicer API — just list the various predicates and it'll take care of the rest for you, e.g. to find all the guys following Emily:

  (follows "emily" ?person) (gender ?person "m")

http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-cascalog-a-clojure-ba...

tedunangst• 16 years ago

blech. html with content-type: text/plain == :(

mccutchen2• 16 years ago

That's because it's being served as raw text data from the Subversion repo.

swah• 16 years ago

If you want to compile on a Mac and you use Homebrew:

  brew install binutils
  cd /usr/bin/local; ln -s gobjdump objdump
  brew install icu4c
  brew link icu4c
  ./configure
  make

chopsueyar2• 16 years ago

Why has Sawzall not experienced the Firebird moment yet?

http://news.cnet.com/2100-7344-5156101.html

DrJosiah6• 16 years ago

Before Google's Go, there was another language named Go. "Chrome" is the name of the UI outside of the content in Mozilla's browser, email client, etc. Google has a smaller-scale ad-hoc SQL-inspired language and system for log queries called Dremel (which is awesome to use, I miss the hell out of it).

Sawzall as a physical tool falls into the same category as Dremel, which hasn't seemed to have been an issue. Never mind the "Go" and "Chrome" names.

jbeda• 16 years ago

If you miss, dremel, you might be interested in BigQuery ;) It is essentially hosted Dremel. Check it out: http://code.google.com/apis/bigquery/

chopsueyar2• 16 years ago

What happened to Dremel (software)?

nlake44• 16 years ago

Anyone got an idea how hard it might be to port this to work on top of Hadoop?

Google Sawzall now open source

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